I can't make my armature affect any mesh deformation
I downloaded your file and got it to work. I am very out of practice with Blender but the file seems to have issues. seems like a lot of vertices for the bear, there is some strangeness in scales of things too. there was a parent loop in the Teddy and armature , when I cleared the parenting the armature shrank. I ended up deleting the whole armature and just making a new one and then the parenting with automatic weights worked.